Legitimacy in the making: Conservatism, additionality and natural capital accreditation in the UK's Woodland Carbon Code

Abstract

This article critically examines the Woodland Carbon Code (WCC), the quality assurance test for UK woodland carbon credits. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders in the Scottish land sector, we show how the WCC's finance allocation, additionality criteria, and carbon measurement systems create legitimacy for the code, the credits the code generates, and the market on which the credits are traded. The paper begins by tracing the early history of the WCC to describe how the code's developers integrated a commitment to calculative conservatism into its design. We then consider how WCC developers responded to a trial of legitimacy. Stakeholders argued that the existence of WCC-accredited commercial timber plantations, which should not have passed its economic additionality criteria, revealed flaws in the WCC's accreditation process. The ensuing threats to the code's legitimacy were exacerbated by broader concerns about the mixed socio-ecological record of natural capital markets worldwide. We then analyse the additionality demands introduced to the code to exclude forest ecologies deemed undesirable from receiving carbon finance. These tweaks were made to shore up the code's legitimacy and to maintain the long-term functioning of the voluntary carbon market. These dynamics are constitutive of the three main claims we make in this article. First, that ecological, political, and scientific forces interact in natural capital markets in ways that threaten the legitimacy of the commodification process by creating undesirable outcomes. Second, that operators of accreditation schemes reflexively respond to these reputational risks by changing the way they measure nature, allocate credits, and direct finance towards particular carbon offsetting projects. Third, that the (il)legibility of nature is, in part, an emergent effect of the way political and cultural pressures bear down on the practices of scientific representation and economic valuation rather than something that is inherent to the ecologies being represented.